Crazy for You (17 page)

This was all my fault, I thought. If Hottie Latte got a reputation as a trouble spot, it might lose its operating license. “It’s okay,” I said hastily. “I’ll go along voluntarily.”

“Then I’m going with you,” Juju declared, throwing down her order pad.

“So am I!” Carleen said.

The other waitresses jumped in, too, insisting that they were going with me even if it meant closing up the shop. This renewed the uproar. The customers didn’t want to see me dragged off, but they didn’t want to be kicked out of their nice warm nest of bosoms and behinds either.

“I’m going by myself,” I yelled at everyone, shrugging into my borrowed coat, a burgundy wool bouclé Samantha had lent me because my pea jacket would have been too identifiable. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Don’t count on it,” Trumbull muttered under his breath.

Outside on the sidewalk, he motioned me toward the police cruiser, double-parked in front of the café. The Doyennes, who’d been lethargically clomping around all morning, suddenly came to life, gathering around like vultures, watching with avid interest.

“Did you arrest her for soliciting johns?” asked Mrs. Uncle Sam, her face alight with interest.

“Are you throwing her in the calaboose?”

“I hope you’re going to grill her.”

“Slap her around until she confesses.”

Trumbull ignored them. “Get in the car,” he ordered me.

“But you said I’m not under arrest.”

He gritted his teeth. “Not yet.”

“Then I’m driving my own car.”

Trumbull looked like he was choking on his own bile. No doubt he’d prefer dragging me into the cruiser by my hair, but there were too many witnesses around, so he contented himself with snarling “Be there,” before slamming into his car.

Chapter Twenty

The day you’re in a police lineup will be the day you’re wearing the pantyhose from hell.

—Maguire’s Maxims

The minute I walked into the Brookwood police station, I started getting heart-pounding flashbacks to the day I’d been arrested for my husband’s murder. My throat tightened, my breathing became shallower, and my fingers went numb. The environment was chilly and hostile. There were no coworkers or customers to protect me here, just hard-eyed cops who looked as though they wanted to see me locked in an airless cell with an overflowing toilet. I caught a glimpse of Josie Wheeler in a nearby office, but she merely glanced up, gave no indication that she recognized me, and went back to work. As a mole, Josie was a little
too
good; it would have been nice to have at least one person here who wasn’t regarding me as though I were
E. coli
bacteria.

I stood at the front counter, stammering out my reason for being there to a scowling desk sergeant. A minute later, Trumbull appeared. Here on his home turf, he’d regained all his bullying swagger.

“Ready for your close-up, Maguire?” he inquired, smiling as though he’d just learned that thumbscrews had been okayed as an interrogation device. “Come with me and I’ll get you set up for the witness ID.”

He led me back through a maze of hallways. “Nothing to worry about, Maguire. Since it wasn’t you with Labeck last night, you can relax, enjoy the experience.”

I had the feeling that this experience was going to be as enjoyable as a pelvic exam.

Trumbull left me with my old chum Officer Krumholz, then went off, probably to check the supply of fingernail extractors and rubber hoses. I wondered whether I ought to compliment Krumholz on the slick job she’d done bugging my phone, but there is a time to smart off, and this wasn’t it. She escorted me into a long, narrow room, took my purse
and coat, and handed me a laminated sheet with the number three in a large font.

“Hold this up in front of you,” she growled. “Chest level.”

One wall of the room was marked with height lines. In my three-inch heels—also a loaner from Samantha, whose feet were the same size as mine—I was flirting with the five-six marking. A long window ran along the opposite side of the room, its surface dark glass that flung back my own reflection.

I knew it was a two-way mirror because I’d seen lineups on TV cop shows. The witness stands behind the window and tries to pick the suspect from a group of six or seven people. My stomach jittered, and I wished I’d had time to use the bathroom. Who was on the other side of the glass? Someone who’d point to number three and state with absolute certainty they’d seen me with Labeck last night? Maybe a passenger on the water taxi or a person we’d jostled running along the Riverwalk?

Two women walked into the room, holding sheets that identified them as lineup participants one and two. Both wore jeans and casual tops. Judging from the rays of hostility they were shooting at me, they were undercover police officers. A middle-aged blonde woman entered the room with a sheet identifying her as four. She wore a starched white shirt and navy pants with a stripe up the sides. She looked as though she’d been pulled off meter maid duty. Josie Wheeler was the last one into the room, wearing her red rhinestone glasses and a red sweater.

I had a bad feeling about this lineup. Chi Chi Dominguez, an inmate serving time for bank robbery, had once explained to me while we both worked steam-press duty how lineups can be rigged. Legally, the police have to select lineup participants who bear a physical resemblance to the accused. If the suspect is a skinny Sudanese, for instance, they can’t throw a bunch of overweight white people into the mix so the suspect stands out.

In this lineup, I stood out. Josie was the only other person here who even had dark hair, and her skin contained a lot more melanin than mine did. What next, an albino dwarf?

The door closed and a bored voice spoke over an intercom. “Face the window.”

A bright light came on overhead and I blinked. The light must mean the witness was in place behind the mirror. Should I smile? No—the same rules applied here as in
prison: smiling invited predators. To survive in a hostile environment you maintained a poker face.

Thirty seconds passed. A bead of sweat popped out on my forehead. None of the other lineup participants were sweating. Sweating was bad. Sweaty people were guilty people. The sweat trickled down my face, salting the Rhonda scratches beneath my layer of makeup and setting up a maddening itch. I’d never wanted to scratch anything in my life as much as I wanted to scratch my cheek. It was torture not scratching that itch.

I could feel eyes boring into me through the glass. For some reason this made me want to blink a lot. Blinking was another telltale sign of guilt, so I forced my lids to stay open. But now I became aware of how dry my lips were. My lips felt like apricots in a solar dehydrator. I desperately wanted to run my tongue over them, but lip-licking was another guilt tic.

Then I became aware of my pantyhose. I was wearing satiny underpants under pantyhose apparently manufactured in newborn size. The pantyhose waistband was gradually creeping from my waist to the middle of my stomach, while its crotch was gathering momentum, heading toward my knees. The face itch was now replaced by the irrepressible urge to tug up my pantyhose.

When I was seventeen, I was in the Miss Quail Hollow pageant. Contestants had to glide across a stage, announce their name and life goal into a microphone, and then walk down a runway, wearing an evening gown and high heels. Walking along that platform, praying I wouldn’t trip, with every eye in the audience critically watching my every step—
chin up, stomach in, shoulders back but not too far back because, God forbid, that would give you blade wings, and smile until your gums ache
—was the most nerve-racking experience of my life.

Until now. The police lineup was, hands down, worse.

I focused on watching the second hand on the wall clock creep around. It must be a special psychological-torture clock, manufactured to make time cycle backward.

“Turn left,” ordered the disembodied voice.

My left, or the left of the person at the window? I turned the way I thought they wanted me to turn and accidentally bumped the blond meter maid.

“Asshole,” she hissed out of the side of her mouth.

“Turn right,” said the voice.

I did it correctly that time.

“Center,” ordered the voice.

We turned back and stared straight ahead. I concentrated on sending telepathic messages to the person on the other side of the glass:
Pick the blonde, pick the blonde…

The light turned off. The voice said, “That is all. Thank you.”

What did that mean? Nobody had been fingered?

I followed numbers four and five out of the room. As I exited, Vincent Trumbull stepped out of the rodent hole where he’d been lurking, looking ominously pleased. “Maguire, come with me,” he barked.

Heart sinking, I followed him. Now what?

Practically quivering with excitement, Trumbull led me down a hallway. We came to a door. “Our witness made a tentative ID. He wants to see you up close and hear your voice.”

“Is that legal?”

Trumbull glared at me. “Let’s just call this an informal meeting.”

Josie Wheeler was at the nearby bubbler getting a drink, pretending not to pay any attention to us, but hopefully taking mental notes on all the legal protocols being trampled here.

I followed Trumbull into a small room containing metal tables, folding chairs, and vending machines. Apparently this was the staff lunchroom. A man stood, steaming cup in hand, near the coffee machine. Even before he turned, the diesel fuel odor told me who this was. Hennessey, the water taxi pilot.

Hennessey studied me. His eyes were bright blue, as though his irises had somehow soaked up color from all those years of working on the water. He wore an oil-splotched flannel shirt, open at the neck to reveal a medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of water travelers. “Morning,” he said, smiling.

“Good morning.” I smiled back, and even though I was still deep in the soup, I was getting good vibes from the guy. His eyes skimmed over me, not missing a thing.

“I identified you in the lineup,” he said. “Thought you resembled this gal in my taxi last night. But I couldn’t be sure. So I asked if I could see you up close.”

“It couldn’t be me. I was at Mass last night.”

A lightning bolt should have shot from the heavens at this blasphemous fib, but God must have hated Vince Trumbull more than he disliked fibbers, because I wasn’t incinerated on the spot.

“What’s your name?” Hennessey asked.

“Mazie Maguire.”

“Maguire. That’s Irish?”

“As Irish as Paddy’s pig.” One of my dad’s old expressions. I was feeling more confident now. The Irish usually stuck up for their own.

Hennessey turned to Trumbull. “This ain’t the one. The one last night was pregnant.”

Trumbull looked as though someone had just jabbed a wiener fork up his nose.

“Why didn’t you mention that before?”

“Slipped my mind.”

“I ought to charge you with obstructing a police investigation,” Trumbull fumed, eyeing Hennessey as though he wanted to string him up by the thumbs.

Hennessey returned the cold stare. “I took my morning off to come down here, I’m losing out on fares, and I get slapped in the face for my trouble? Pardon my French, Lieutenant, but you can go to hell.”

With that, Hennessey set down his coffee cup and headed for the door. Trumbull didn’t see the wink Hennessey sent me, or the way his fingers thumped against his shirt pocket, a pocket that might still contain Labeck’s C-note, since Hennessey didn’t smell like the kind of guy who changed his shirts every day.

My legs suddenly went weak. I slumped back against the coffee machine to steady myself. “Can I go now?” I asked.

Trumbull shot me a venomous look. “Not until you tell me where Labeck is hiding.”

“No clue.”

“You’re a little liar!” Trumbull punched the coffee machine, his big fist landing an inch from my head. “I ought to arrest you for withholding information.”

His bean-colored eyes drilled into mine. “You’re going to wish you’d played ball
with me when you had the chance.”

He stalked out of the room, leaving me with a pounding heart, quivering bladder, and the fervent hope that he’d broken his hand. The vending machine had a large, fist-shaped dent right next to my head, and brown stuff was dribbling out of the spigot.

I checked to make sure nothing was dribbling out of me before I left.

Chapter Twenty-one

If we really valued privacy in this country, we would make cellphone cameras illegal.

—Maguire’s Maxims

GoMo cellphones had the acoustical range of tin cans tied together with string, and the sleek design of a bag of Fruit Runts. Their saving grace was that they were so cheap, if you accidentally dropped yours in the toilet, you wouldn’t feel bad.

“This is your basic model,” said the clerk at the Walgreen’s electronics counter, a cute Asian guy with magenta-dyed bangs hanging down into his eyes. “It’s on special for twelve ninety-nine this week.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. “Two of them, please.”

He wasn’t done pitching yet. “But for seven more bucks, ma’am, you can get the GoMo Deluxe. Texting, video, photos—a ninety-nine dollar device for only nineteen ninety-nine.”

“I don’t need photos or video, just a basic phone.”

He shook his head. “You never know when you’re going to want to snap a picture. And you can’t be without video these days. You might be in a tornado and be able to sell your film to a TV station. My cousin uploaded a video to YouTube of her three-year-old singing the alphabet song to the family dog. It went viral and now my cousin’s got a dog food sponsor. And look at Justin Bieber—he got his start when his mom uploaded—”

“Okay,” I said, laughing. “I’ll take the deluxe model.” I wasn’t planning on becoming an Internet singing sensation, but the clerk was helpful and nice and deserved the sale. “You said I don’t need a service provider?”

“Nope. No monthly bills. With a GoMo, you buy a card that gives you like, ninety days and a hundred twenty minutes or—”